I HAVE breast cancer - It's in my bones. This WAS supposed to be my journey through the healing process and survival, but darned if I didn't win the lottery again. This is for the rest of my life - the medications and treatments that I have the privilege of access too by virtue of being Canadian. This is my out let.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Ultrasound / Bone Density Scan Day

Had to fast for the ultrasound. I'm always confused about hospital gowns - front wards / backwards. It seems to change every other visit. And doesn't always seem logical considering the procedure.

Getting an ultrasound is generally easy. Except this time the technician was all over my lower ribs and that just hurts! I'm not ticklish but even a small amount of pressure on the lowest ribs always feels like I'm being crushed. The hard plastic of the ultrasound wand may as well have been a metal golf club head. But that's just me. And she went all the way around from the back of my left ribs across the front and around to the back of my right ribs. Thats a lot of imaging goop. Could that stuff be nastier?

After that I went down the hall to Nuclear Imaging where I was injected with some kind of dye and had 3 hours to kill before my appointment with the bone camera. Time to eat and drink.

Everyone said it was similar to an MRI... not really. An MRI is kind of like being crammed into a skinny metal barrel while Japanese Taiko Drummers hammer on the sides. Nuclear imaging is quite relaxing in comparison.

My face started close to an imaging panel but over the course of 25 minutes that panel moved all the way down to my toes. I wasn't even really aware of the passage of time, for the most part. Thanks to the meditation portion of yoga classes I'm really good at slipping into a relaxed state and separating body and mind. In other words I slept through the first scan! That was followed by two 3 minute scans of my elbows.

I requested a copy of the scans just for curiosity sake... no problem. Didn't even have to buy the copy. Cool. It's not every day you get to take home a picture of your skeleton.